Not everyday in the bus is a fairytale of life on the road, full of adventure. There are many days where things aren’t functioning as we need them to be. Prior to departing anywhere, both me and Todd have our inside and outside checklists that we go through to make sure both us and Ruby are ready to go. The inside jobs make me feel like a flight attendant, putting everything away, locking cabinets and cupboards and double checking to make sure they are all locked and everything is put down so nothing goes flying we are turning corners or speeding up on the highways. On the outside Todd puts all the outside things in their designated spot in the bins, unplugs all the cords (when used) and checks the tire pressures to make sure Ruby is ready. We are mostly a well oiled machine….after 5 years of living in a bus, we feel like we have a very good routine but every so often the routine slaps us across the face and says “told you so!”. More than once the drawers have flown open on a sharp left turn, plates and bowls crashing to the floor, the bedroom drawers fly open if we have to slam on our breaks or the slack adjusters weren’t set right and the next thing you know it looks like our brakes are burning right off, you know just the normal things that happen when you live in a bus! This is the reality of our life that isn’t for everyone.

One of the biggest challenges we have always had is electricity, when we aren’t plugged in, since you need power for pretty much everything (coffee maker, microwave, toaster, hot water heater, outlets, lights, starlink, etc)! This is especially noticeable during extreme temperatures of hot and cold. Most Prevost bus owners typically go to RV parks with plug in power and if not, there was a backup generator onboard. We took our generator out – it took up a lot of space, was loud and could probably power a small city block – 17,000 watts for anyone that needed to know. We really didn’t think we would ever use it and to be honest we rarely have to use the portable generator we replaced it with. In case you didn’t know, we aren’t the typical Prevost bus owner that like to go to RV parks with power, we prefer off grid places where we don’t have to rely on plugging in. In order to still have electricity on demand, we had to go with solar. The bus did not have any solar panels when we bought her, and 5 years ago we added 4 solar panels on the roof with 8 batteries + 3 – this was fine and worked ok, but we couldn’t run A/C down the highway, only certain outlets were connected to solar, and we had to be strategic about what was plugged in for what reason. Since we are planning a big trip to a hot destination, Todd figured we should add more solar so we don’t have to worry about electrical strategies. So this spring, Todd added an additional 4 more panels on the roof and a pallet jack battery in the basement – the pallet jack battery is equivalent to 10 batteries (over 2000 lbs of batteries)! This also meant he had to be add another inverter and charge controller. It took him a few days to install the panels, a day to prep and install the palletjack battery and a few more days to run the electrical wire, drill a hole in the roof and connect all of it to the right locations and make it work. I was just getting used to the old way things worked with power and finally understood what I had to do to make things work and now I have a whole new system to learn and control panels I need to look at….ugh. Once it was all installed, Todd spent a couple days figuring out panel readings, switching things on and off, wondering if it was all set up right!

We were pretty excited to try out our new solar power install while parked in Calgary for Stampede. We have a top-secret location that we park the bus at, very close to Stampede Park, basically on the city streets with no power hook ups of course. The day we arrived the outside temp was 34C! You can imagine how hot it was getting on the inside. Once we got levelled out, the inside temp was rising. It took about 45 mins of flipping breakers, reading control panel numbers and lots of pacing, but finally the A/C kicked on and it was working off solar! We spent the next 6 days and 5 nights boondocking in the city, fully functioning off solar power for everything and it was awesome!  We  hope  that electrical  agony  is  now  far  behind  us!

4 New panels

1. is the new pallet jack battery
2. is the new inverter
3. 8 batteries

4. Another inverter 5. Charge controllers

Stampede! Neither of us had been in 9 years, and usually we don’t plan to be in the city during that time – it’s a gong show of people. But this year we decided to see what’s new. We were pleasantly surprised at much Stampede appeared “upgraded”. Not sure if it was the addition of the new BMO centre, the fact that they moved the coke stage and other activities to better area’s, possibly other building upgrades (Nutrien centre)…not sure but we thought it “looked” better. We had purchased a super pass – so we could come and go as often as we wanted to the grounds. The first night Logan met up with us for dinner at the bus and we walked over to the grounds, go our mega pack of lottery tickets, took a short walk around and then to Nashville North tent for the James Barker Band. Neither of us had been to NN tent in probably 20 years – and that has also changed a lot. By the time the band started, Todd wiggled our way through the crowd, and got us front row for the concert. Here is evidence of that: Nashville North Tent (rumble.com) If you made it to through the video to around 2:05, I stated a pretty cool thing that happened to us at the concert!

The next day we arrived later in the day and headed to the BMO centre to checkout the facility, the art and the wine bar. I may have made some new friends at the next table, we had amazing conversation. My new friends were in Calgary for this conference: Conference | Call — Canadian Association of LGBTQ2S+ Lawyers | Acal — Association canadienne des avocats·es LGBTQ2S+ (prismeconference.ca) AND at their first stampede ever! Saturday was also the second coming of Wade’s 58^th birthday – he already thought he was 58, but he wasn’t, so he had a do-over! After dinner we headed over to the Big 4 and he attempted bull riding (Bull riding (rumble.com)) before we saw Ceelo Green. A few pics of fun: Stampede Pics (rumble.com)

And on our final Sunday, we headed over to the Chuckwagon races (Chucks (rumble.com)), Indian Relay races (Yes this is the correct term – they actually said it at the race on the loud speaker (Relay Races (rumble.com) and here is a link about how crazy they are: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-horses-sport-race-community-games-1.6472864) and the finale for the Grand Stand show. This was probably the BEST show I’ve ever seen, hands down! A great mix of song, dance, technical acrobatics, musicality, drone light show and fire works. IT. WAS. AWESOME.

We went back to the family land for a few days to recover from all the fun, had a short visit with family and we headed out on our next weekend spot to a new (to us) location at Cow Lake provincial park. Todd and I had been there in the winter but never in the summer. We checked the website and were shocked to see a provincial campground on a lake with open spots! We arrived at the campground and went directly to the boat launch to get the boat in the water before we setup our home spot. You can imagine the looks we get from beach dwellers with our 40 ft Ruby, launching a boat at the boat launch. We spent at last 3-4 hours a day over the next 3 days in the boat on the water. The lake temp was never less than 75F! it was like bath water and was glassy pretty much everyday! Todd’s friend Mike showed up with his fishing rod on Saturday and we had a great visit. We met a lot of Europeans at this campsite who were renting RV’s, on their very first trip visiting Canada and all were amazed by her beauty! Here is some evidence of our great time at the lake: Cow lake (rumble.com)

The campground manager Darla (@wildblueroam) fell in love with our Ruby; she has a Bluebird skoolie that she converted herself! Her youtube channel is here: wildblueroam – YouTube. We had some great chats about life on the road and she bragged about us on her Insta!